In My Time - Dick Cheney [124]
In a speech to the nation on September 27, 1991, President Bush directed that the United States eliminate its entire worldwide inventory of ground-launched short-range nuclear weapons. We would bring home our nuclear artillery shells and short-range ballistic missile warheads from Europe. And he called on the Soviets to do the same. He also announced we would withdraw all tactical nuclear weapons from our surface ships and attack submarines and remove all nuclear weapons from our land-based naval aircraft. And, again, he called on the Soviets to do the same. Then he turned to the issue of our strategic nuclear weapons, which had been the subject of a new treaty, START, signed with President Gorbachev in July 1991. President Bush said he wanted to use that treaty “as a springboard to achieve additional stabilizing changes.” Therefore, he ordered all U.S. strategic bombers to immediately stand down from their alert posture. He also pledged to accelerate the destruction of the intercontinental ballistic missile systems scheduled to be eliminated as part of the START talks and announced the termination of the development of the new mobile Peacekeeper ICBM system.
The president also announced that he would be consolidating operational command of our sea-, land-, and air-based strategic nuclear forces in one command, which is now called STRATCOM, headquartered at Offutt Air Force Base. On October 5, 1991, Gorbachev, as president of the Soviet Union, responded to our proposals with an impressive set of cuts the Soviets were willing to make in both their tactical and strategic nuclear arsenals, and he agreed to take Soviet bombers off alert as well. We had succeeded in launching a new approach to arms control—faster, deeper, and more flexible than before.
As we responded to changes in the Soviet Union by offering reductions in our nuclear inventory, we were also thinking about our overall force posture. From the end of World War II until the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1992, we had planned our defensive and offensive military capabilities primarily around meeting, countering, and defending against a Soviet threat. In late 1989 we had begun to think about cuts that could be made to reflect the emerging new strategic reality, and after months of analysis we had proposed the concept of the “base force,” which President Bush had accepted and outlined in a speech in Aspen, Colorado, on August 2, 1990. The speech came only hours after Saddam’s tanks rolled into Kuwait, and the attention of the world shifted to the Persian Gulf. Once we had liberated Kuwait, I asked Wolfowitz to take the concept laid out in our base force approach, and using some of the most important lessons we had learned from operations in Desert Storm, put together a new Defense Planning Guidance document that would describe the challenges America faced and the strategic position we should adopt to meet them throughout the 1990s and beyond.
It had been my experience that too often everyday challenges prevent top policymakers from taking the time to think strategically. It is much easier to accede to the moment, blunting crises or responding to opportunities. It takes time and discipline to force yourself and those in the bureaucracy to take a step back and think about America’s strategic goals and challenges, but it is essential. You can’t hope to adopt the wisest policies without a sense of where the country should be heading and how we should steer the ship to get there. There are places set up to do this in the government, such as the policy planning shop at the State Department and the office of the undersecretary for policy in the Pentagon. But often the individuals in these offices